


Little Red Rowing Boat

by afterism



Category: Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mermaids, F/F, Fairy Tale Retellings, Unusual Friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:07:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28106757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afterism/pseuds/afterism
Summary: Once upon a time, a young woman met a mermaid with sharp eyes and long teeth.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 36
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Little Red Rowing Boat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maybetwice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/gifts).



"You're a long way from shore, little one."

The boat wobbles, oars clattering, as Ivana jumps up and swipes her hat off her face. For a moment, there's nothing — just the ripples spilling out across the syrup-flat sea, the hot sun and the islands behind her — but then there's a burble of noise, like someone laughing underwater, and a face pops up at the other end of the boat.

Eyes, as huge and dark as the sea under a storm. Ivana is dimly, distantly aware of pointed ears and glittering hair and skin that flashes grey and silver and iridescent, but mostly there's the eyes, looking back at her.

"Mermaid," Ivana says, dumbly.

"Human," the mermaid says. "I've never seen such a young one before. Where's your beard?" She curls her hands over the edge of the boat (human-like, Ivana notes, except for the colour, and the webbing between her fingers) and inches closer, tilting her head.

"I don't plan on growing one," Ivana says, swallowing down the absurd urge to laugh, to lean closer, to grab a net and catch her. Her thoughts dart towards her father — half drowned in the last storm that rolled between the hills for days, his arm crushed between two boats as he set out with the rest of the village to rescue the one foolish fisherman who had set out under the clouds, now bedridden and barely aware of her — and what he would do. What he would expect her to do.

She had come down to the water early to haul in the nets she put out last night, to check the traps and, maybe, if the water was being generous, spend a little time with nothing but the air and the sea and the silence.

The mermaid has moved a little closer.

"What do you want?"

"Me?" the mermaid says, blinking. "To show you where the best place to fish is, of course!" She points, out towards the open water, where the birds are circling and the waves glint like throngs of fish are bubbling under the surface. Ivana's father had taught her to see the secrets in the flight of birds; to see under the water by the wings overhead.

He also showed her maps of the sea, of the islands and shoals and shallow banks they must avoid. She knows that south of the island there's a forest of rocks just below the surface — on a high spring tide she could row across them, just about. At low tide the red hull of her boat would ground with the shriek of splintering wood.

She looks at the mermaid and thinks, _siren_.

Her heart thuds in her chest. She's all alone out here — she can see the shoreline just a mile away but there's no one around. She's got her two buckets full of fresh food and she should have gone back home already, but — _but_ , she's the daughter of a fisherman, and he's taught her to take care of herself.

"Get away from me," Ivana says, and the siren's mouth twists.

"Why? Are you afraid I might eat you?" she says, her face pulling into something like a smile, showing her teeth. They're long and pointed like a dog's, and Ivana slides her hand along the bench, towards the knife she uses for gutting the fish — but then the siren's face changes, brightens, as she laughs. Ivana thinks of squalls moving across the water, the weather changing in a breath.

"No, there's nothing of you," the siren says, and Ivana — gangly since she was thirteen, her shoulders built broad on helping to haul nets and drag the boat up the shore, the only child of a man who expected sons — frowns.

"You would taste like empty potential. Like — like a lobster pot," she says, as Ivana feels her face growing hot, and bites her tongue on arguing back about how she would _taste_. "But," the siren continues, tilting her head to study her, "a morsel must do if you're hungry. And you would be something new."

"Try it," Ivana says, and there's that laugh like water rushing over pebbles. She watches the siren's gaze slip down, taking in the buckets and nets and her sandalled feet, the tangled weights and her basket of breakfast.

The siren looks up, the corner of her mouth darkening. "Give me something else, then," she says, holding Ivana's gaze.

Ivana, holding onto the bench so tightly it hurts, darts a look across the bottom of the boat. She nudges one of the buckets with her foot.

"Fish? Darling, no, I've got plenty of that. You must have something new," she says, her eyes sharp. Ivana swallows, and inches her hand a little further along the woodgrain. She has fish hooks and nets and a knife made for sinking quick through scaly flesh — but the first thing her hand finds is her basket, carried down from home, containing nothing but bread crumbs and waxed paper and a bundle of flowers, daisies and blueweed and cowslips, that she had picked on her way down the hill for no better reason that she liked the way the dawn light caught across the petals.

The weather of the siren's face changes again. "Flowers?" she says, her gaze darting up to Ivana's eyes and back again, looking ravenous, looking _thrilled_. "No one's ever brought me flowers before."

Ivana swallows, and unthreads the loose bunch from all the catches in the weave, gathering them together. The siren reaches out a hand, her face all open expectance, and Ivana pauses. "If I give you flowers," she starts, and watches the honey-slow way the siren's gaze flicks up to hers, "Do you promise not to eat me?"

The siren smiles — small, close-lipped. "That seems fair, little one," she says, and stretches her hand out towards her again. She wiggles her fingers, her skin glittering rainbows in the bright morning light. Frowns, and then sighs. "I _promise_ ," she says, and Ivana stops hugging the flowers to her chest, and passes them into the siren's hand.

Her heart stops as their fingers brush — the siren is _warm_ , like a sun-soaked stone, like a drifting current — and it starts again with a funny kind of skip as the siren looks at her through her eyelashes. "You are a sweet thing," the siren says, secrets darkening the corner of her mouth, and then drops away with a splash.

Ivana crumples, like a broken line. Her heart is pounding; her shoulders scream from being held like stone; her palms are splintered and smarting from gripping the bench. She's fine, she tells herself, gasping for air like she's being diving for a lost trap. If it was a dream, it's over.

Salt water hits her bare knee, and something heavy hits the bottom of her boat.

There's a lobster facing her.

It's huge and blue and beautiful, almost as long as her arm — it must be half a century old, at least — and as Ivana scrambles to find something to bind its claws with there's a laugh and a splash and silence again.

\---

She's always loved the sea.

Ivana has always been the first to the shoreline; the first to get her feet wet; the first to offer to dive in to untangle a line or scavenge the seabed. She's grazed countless stretches of skin on submerged rocks and watched, fascinated, the ribbons of red hanging like a separate thing in the water before twisting and stretching and disappearing into the current. Even the sting of salt feels like a healing kiss, like she's part of the water, like she could stretch out her fingers and forget where she ends and the sea begins.

It wasn't a dream; she has the lobster to prove it.

It's not fear that keeps her away from the water for a week, either. Her father recovers from his fever but his arm doesn't. All the fish she caught has been cooked or salted or sold. Neighbours, friends of her father come to visit (long-since friends of her mother, too), to offer their relief that it isn't them stretched out on the bed, their pity hidden behind firm hands and baskets of plums.

She tells no one. She cooks and scrubs and mends and fixes — she keeps the house in order, as best as she can, and as soon as she finds a moment to herself she runs down to the shore with a handful of flowers ripped from the grass. The pebbles crack together with a sound like chalk as she pushes out the boat, the sun sitting heavily on the horizon as the few wisps of cloud stretch across the sky in peach and gold.

There are no lights yet lit in the houses on her island to the east, none on the scraps of land scattered like pebbles to the north, no other boats in between; she has the world to herself. There's a chop to the water, the wind picking up, but it's still sparkling clear as cut glass and she wastes no time in pulling off her dress and knotting her hair back with a ribbon.

She jumps in. The water swallows her up with a splash that slaps her bare arms, and she lets the roar of the world flipping over wash past her — eyes screwed shut, nose pinched tightly, lips pressed together — until she can feel the balance between gravity and salt water again, and pushes back up to the air. A moment to get her bearings; to grab hold of the rope she tied to the boat; to get her breath back, and then she slips back under the water and opens her eyes wide.

The world is translucent and endless and the sound of her own blood in her ears. She holds the hammering of her heart like an anchor line, like the reason she has to do this, and looks into the blue that stretches into solidness, and the kelp and the rocks and urchins below, and fish the size of plums and a thousand flittering things all around her.

 _Come and get me_ , the beat in her chest says, but there's nothing bigger than a flurry of shadow-striped _lokarda_ darting past. Ivana spins, bubbles popping in her ears and looks and looks and looks — scanning the blue until she has to lurch back up gasping, her lips tingling from the salt. Nothing.

A deep breath, a prayer, and she goes down again. The light slowly shifts and the world contracts, fish scuttering past with the sunset flashing along their sides, but she could name every one, can conjure the taste on her tongue or the warnings from others — she knows these waters. They belong to _her_.

It's almost dark when she finally clambers back into the boat, the sun long since melted into the sea and the air snatching cold at the water on her skin.

Ivana scrubs herself with a blanket and then wraps herself in it, and in the rising moonlight she looks at the bunch of flowers on one side of the boat, and her fish-gutting knife on the other. She tucks her toes under the edge of the wool.

"What are you doing?" a voice whispers, like it doesn't want to startle her.

Ivana startles anyway, the blanket jerking off her shoulders as she twists. The siren is peeping over the bow of the boat behind her, her nose tucked between her curled hands.

"Waiting for you," Ivana admits, gathering up her warmth like a shield and huddling into it again.

The siren bobs up, her face glowing in the last drips of dusklight. Ivana catches a glimpse of a smile, a flash of teeth, before the siren tucks herself behind her fingers again.

"It's dangerous to be out here alone," she says, muffled but bright.

"I'm not scared," Ivana says, forcing a shiver down beneath her ribs.

"Of course not, little one," the siren says, and shifts her hands so Ivana can see her face; the twist in her smile, the silver of her cheek. The boat rocks in the water as the siren leans on the edge. "Did you come all this way just to bring me another gift?"

Ivana, inexplicably, feels her cheeks flush hot.

The truth is, she's no longer sure why she's here. Her world became so condensed to the need to get away, the need to get back to the water, that she never questioned what she would do once she was there. Perhaps there was a dim, childish hope that she could bring enough flowers to protect everyone in her village, or everyone on the surrounding islands, or everyone who shares her history — what an impossible thought.

She could do what fishermen do and land the catch, pull out the guts and display her trophy — but her own stomach turns at the thought. _What then?_ looms queasily around it. 

The problem is, she thinks, is that this creature is strange and new and she _doesn't understand it_. Ivana thought she knew everything about her island and the waters and the people in it.

"If I give you a gift, what will you give me?" Ivana asks.

The siren grins. "Something unique," she says. "I could show you places no human has ever seen. I could give you the air my lungs pull from the sea and let you breathe underwater."

"You could drag me to the bottom and leave me there," Ivana cuts across. The siren frowns.

"Why would I do that?"

Ivana waves her hands, trying to encompass the whole world in a gesture before hissing lightly and snatching her blanket back around her. "Because that's what you do!"

"I only drag down those who are already drowning," she says.

"What difference does that make?"

The siren's mouth narrows, her eyes twitching tighter like she doesn't understand. "Because otherwise they might have enough breath to _fight back_ ," she explains, her brow furrowed.

Ivana scoffs, but then, considers: the siren has no claws, no weapons. All she has are teeth and speed and intelligence, soft flesh and easily-pierced skin — deadly, no doubt, but one-on-one with an armed and thrashing human they are, perhaps, at a disadvantage.

It occurs to Ivana that the siren might be taking as much of a risk as she is.

"Okay," Ivana says, carefully. She's solved nothing, changed nothing, but all the same it feels like something's shifted — an understanding between the land and the sea, a shoreline of possibility.

The siren watches her, eyes bright, face unreadable. The moonlight scatters along the ruffled waves, the evening breeze kissing her cheek.

"Okay," Ivana says again, gathering up the flowers from the bottom of the boat — straggly and wilted, now, and mostly washed-out in the silver light. "Take me with you."

The siren studies her, until her eyes crinkle and she laughs.

"For those, I wouldn't take you any further than you could swim yourself," the siren says, eyes twinkling like the stars, but there's no sting to it. She's looking at her, not the sad bunched thing in her hand, and Ivana has the odd impression it's not about the flowers. "Ask me another day," she says.

\---

A handful of years pass. Ivana buries her father beside her mother and claims an island for herself, so small and scrubby that no one else wants it despite the few olive trees growing near the old stone ruins. She builds fours walls and raises goats and claws out a living among the rocks, as stubborn and shallow-rooted as the grass.

There's a day when she has to row over to the main island, and there's a two-masted _trabakul_ in the harbour. She meets a sailor with eyes the colour of a storm-dark sea and, for no better reason than she wants to, shares her bed with him for a week.

(She honestly thought no man would ever catch her eye, never felt anything more than vague curiosity during mutual fumblings in the dark, but her world is small despite the endless stretch of the sea to the south and the west. She's known most of the men in town since birth — although, she knows them less well than the land and the sea. She knows their names, and in one or two cases how their lips taste, and never wanted anything more.)

Three seasons pass in the changing winds and she names her squalling daughter Tajana, and never sees the sailor again.

The siren visits a few times a year, though, as the world tilts towards summer and colours sprout in the wild grass. She suns herself in the shallows as Ivana sits on the rocks and picks through her catch, sliding the little ones out of the nets and throwing them back into the sea to grow bigger. Her father had always impressed the importance of that, to her — of only taking the fish big enough to be worth it, who were fully grown and ready.

Tajana sprawls on a blanket a few steps away, out of reach of the water and playing with her toes.

"I have a gift for you, if you want it," the siren says, between the quiet rush of small waves breaking against the rocks. "A place I think you'd like to see."

"I couldn't leave my daughter," Ivana says gently.

"She's old enough to look after herself, isn't she?" the siren asks, frowning.

Ivana barks out a laugh, but when the siren just frowns deeper she realises she's serious, and laughs louder.

"We don't leave our little ones to fend for themselves so quickly," Ivana explains after a joyful beat, still smiling.

The siren pouts. "I'd bring you back again, if you really wanted," she says, and Ivana blinks.

"If I really wanted?" Ivana echoes, thinking over previous conversions like turning a shell in the sunlight, seeing it from different angles, the way the colours catch. "What if I didn't want to come back?"

The siren grins. "You could stay with me forever."

Ivana narrows her eyes. "I thought you didn't want to eat me," she says, and the siren laughs.

"You would taste like something, now," she says, her smile full of teeth.

"We had a deal," Ivana teases back, sing-song, but there's solid ground beneath her, and a knife closer to hand than flowers.

The siren tilts her head to the side, looking past Ivana's shoulder for a moment. "A gift for a gift," she says, and then, "Wait there."

Ivana throws her hands up in the air, _where am I going to go_ , but the siren splashes off with a showy flick of her tail that makes Tajana squeal in outrage and then, when her mother pays no attention, go back to studying her feet.

The sun is still climbing when the siren comes back.

"A gift for a gift," she begins, like that explains where she's been for an hour, why she came back immediately instead of in a month like usual. "Bring me something to eat and I'll give you something."

Ivana, repairing nets in the shade of an olive tree, levels a long look at the siren's open, expectant expression. She tightens her mouth. The siren blinks. The air is heavy with pine and salt and old woolen nets, but she has work to do and the siren is still waiting, that guileless smile lingering around her lips --

" _Fine_ ," Ivana snaps, scoping up Tajana from her busy work of tasting rocks under her basket-parasol and carrying her inside. She comes back a long half an hour later, carrying a basket of puffed flat breads instead of her child.

The siren is nowhere to be seen, and for a hot, irritated moment Ivana wants to fling the whole basket into the sea — but that familiar face pops up, smiling, and Ivana feels that same panicked flutter she felt when she was a girl. It has shifted, perhaps, more in her centre than her heart, but she still catches her face warming when the siren smiles in that particular secret way.

"I thought you weren't coming back," the siren says, sounding almost shy.

Ivana gathers up her annoyance like a shield, and huffs. "I already have one demanding creature," she says, picking her way down the short hillside to the rocks at the edge of the water. She crouches, setting the basket down beside her, and sighs a little as she slips her feet into the cold sea.

The siren swims close, brushing her fingertips around Ivana's ankle so lightly it could just be the edge of the water, the play between air and sea across her skin. "Well?" she asks, looking up through her eyelashes.

Ivana taps her fingers along the top of the breads, the insides still steaming from the pan, and picks one that seems the most ready to eat. She tears it in two before handing over a half. "It's still hot," she warns.

The siren considers it, the burst of heat rising from the middle, and then immediately drops it in the water. Ivana makes a noise between laughter and a shout.

"It'll keep," the siren says, a slight frown between her brows as she watches it float. "It's just the rules, really."

Before Ivana can question that there's an oyster shell being offered up, the siren's expectant face just behind, the slightest smile playing along the line of her mouth.

"Oh", Ivana says, taking it. It's the size of her hand, ribbed and mottled and grey and brown. She darts a glance at the siren and finds her wide-eyed and nodding, so she turns it on its edge and prises it open with no effort at all.

Inside, between the outline of beige and the iridescent sheen of the shell, where the oyster's flesh should sit, is nothing but the ugliest pearl she's ever seen. It's dull and grey and slimy.

"Eat it," the siren says.

"Oh," Ivana says, again, and presses her lips together. "Maybe later."

"Trust me," the siren says, and Ivana flicks her gaze up, meets those storm-dark eyes. "Eat it."

There's a question. Tentative curiosity has slowly filled out into this strange kind of friendship, the kind that only exists in the edge between things. When she thinks of the siren it's in dusklight and shallows, in the drag of the water across the pebbles, in the change of the tides. It's a space of unreality, of potentials, not trust.

They've given each other more gifts that Ivana has shared with anyone else; flowers and fruits and olives from the land, crabs and shells and sparkling things from the seabed. Before Tajana was a kicking creature beneath her hand, Ivana would try to find the most wondrous thing to present to the siren in the hope that this time, this object, would be enough to take her with her.

The siren has never offered up something so unappealing before. She's never asked Ivana to give her trust, either, but every time Ivana has sat like this with her feet in the water and no knife to hand she's given a little more, like throwing out a baited line.

Just another oyster, Ivana thinks, turning her grimace into a swallow, schooling her face into polite interest, and tips the shell into her mouth. It tastes like... like nothing, at first, and then like the air above the sea on a still, windless day, and as it slips down her throat it seems to fizz and dissolve and disappear into nothingness.

Ivana swallows again, frowning.

"It's a gift for the future," the siren says, eyes sparkling.

\---

Tajana begins as wild as the water, loud and unpredictable and stealing all of Ivana's sleep, but all too soon she grows into a well-mannered young woman who, in defiance of her mother, marries a respectable man and sets up her own house on the main island.

She visits regularly, though, rowing herself in her mother's old red-hulled boat, and before long there's a child with hair the colour of fire and eyes the colour of a storm-dark sea with her, tumbling around Ivana's ankles. Vatroslava has her grandmother's stubbornness and an insatiable curiosity, demanding stories of sailors and mermaids and storms that her grandmother, being ancient, must know.

Sometimes Ivana stands alone with her feet in the water, watching the main island in the distance, and, without quite knowing why, feels like a fledgling bird on the edge of its nest — knowing that with one more step it could fly, but also that it could never come back.

\---

It's a tricky route to grandma's, to the tiny pebbled inlet on the tiny island where the boat can be safely put ashore. The shoreline to the east and west is full of jagged grey rocks, wolves' teeth beneath the waves, and you must know where to face as you row blindly backwards.

This is the first time Vatroslava has rowed out all by herself. It's always been her mother who steers the boat, as she trails her hands in the water and watches the red of their hull be caught and split a thousand times in the angles of the waves. She loves it best when they stay late and they have to row back in the darkness, for all that her mother gets cross and silent about it — Vatroslava leans over the side and watches the explosion of lights around the oars as they cut through the water, the swirl of a thousand stars beneath the surface.

Today, her mother is too busy with the new baby, and her father is working, so Vatroslava wears her stubbornness like a cape as she unties her boat from the old jetty, and pushes off. She wishes she could go from the next cove, where the main harbour of the island sits (that once held a carrack, her grandmother has told her, with three masts that reached taller than the tallest tree on the island, that her grandfather stole away on to become a pirate), but instead she stares at the old, empty jetty as she rows away. It's bleached white by the salt and the sun, its legs black with seaweed, and the only good thing about it is that it's easy to come and go without having to drag the boat up the beach. Getting out at grandma's requires getting your feet wet.

She takes a bunch of fresh-picked flowers with her every time she's on the water, with the same reflex that makes her throw spilled salt over her shoulder — it must be done, even if she doesn't understand why — and the day is bright and clear, barely a breath of wind to fight against. Her mother has let her row enough times that her arms are strong, and Vatroslava loses herself in the push-pull strokes so completely that, when the boat suddenly hits something, her immediate thought is that she must have arrived already.

Then something laughs, and she realises she's still in the middle of the sea between the islands, and there really shouldn't be anything for the boat to hit.

"Where are you off to, little one?" says a voice behind her, and Vatroslava twists, the oars clattering as she drags them with her.

There's a woman in the water, is her first thought, but her skin looks like scales and there's no white in her eyes. Her long, dark hair spills out around her like seaweed. Her fingers, stretched wide over the water as she floats a foot away, are grey and webbed, and although the undulations of the waves obscure her body from the shoulders down there is, most definitely, a tail.

"Who are you?" Vatroslava demands, despite — well, the obvious.

"Your grandmother calls me Vučica," the mermaid says, and smiles in a way that mostly shows her teeth.

"Oh," Vatroslava says, curiosity drowning the panic in her chest. "You know my grandmother?"

"Yes, darling," the mermaid says. "Tell me — can you fend for yourself yet?"

A bubble of pride rises under her ribs. "Yes," Vatroslava says, defiantly.

The mermaid's smile sharpens, and Vatroslava hisses in a breath. 

"You're the siren my grandmother warned me about," she realises. She narrows her eyes, and says, "My mother doesn't think you're real," like that should make the siren apologise and promptly stop existing.

The siren laughs. "Spawn of her spawn," she says. "Do you think she'd forgive me if I ate you?"

Vatroslava stiffens, and the siren laughs louder.

"No, sweetness, you're nothing," the siren says, and even as Vatroslava goes hot with strange indignation the siren frowns, and comes closer, stretching her hand across the boat like she wants to touch her face. Vatroslava leans back. "Perhaps when you've gained some years and your face isn't so oddly smooth. You are a lake, barely filled — there are no waters to swim in."

Vatroslava tightens her mouth, biting the inside of her cheek against the urge to do something stupid like cry, and the siren tilts her head as she draws her hand back, studying her. "Give it time," the siren says. "Everything grows with time."

"I'm not a lake," Vatroslava says, but the siren's gaze has wandered.

"You brought me flowers? Darling, those are my _favourite_ ," she says, and Vatroslava blinks, and understanding comes in a rush of bubbles like a gasp underwater.

\---

Ivana stands with her feet in the water, watching her siren tease her granddaughter half a mile away, and thinks about how shallow roots, no matter how strong, can still be pulled up by a high tide. 

Vatroslava hands over something, a burst of yellow among the blue, and Ivana's chest swells with pride, and sadness, and love deeper than the ocean. Her daughter's visits have dwindled to once a month, if that, and her granddaughter loves her fiercely but she can't stay just for her.

Her siren lingers for a moment more, hands curled over the edge of the old, faithful boat, before dropping down below the surface like a stone. Ivana watches Vatroslava scramble to watch her go, the boat rocking alarmingly, but it steadies quickly and her granddaughter settles back down in the middle, not picking up the oars again, just waiting like there's something she needs to consider.

The siren slinks into the shallows, and pops up grinning.

"She's a sweet thing."

"She's a lot younger than I was, when we first met. Did you threaten her?"

"Only a little," the siren says, looking up through her eyelashes. "You know she's too small for my tastes."

"Hmm," Ivana says, and then, "You called me a lobster pot," she says, looking out to the endless stretch of water to the south. "What am I now?"

"You're an ocean," the siren says, eyes sparkling. "I would never eat you. I could drink you endlessly and never know your depths."

Ivana swallows. She wonders how the siren sees her, sometimes; full of life, her face lined by the joy of her years, her hair as glittering as the foam.

"Will you come and see all the things I want to show you, now?" the siren asks, swimming out a little further so her tail can float free. She stretches out a hand, beckoning.

Ivana takes a breath, and thinks of birds, and when she dives in it's as though the water swallows her whole. 

\---

(She kicks and her legs are strong and silver-scaled, and she can _breathe_ , and when the siren draws her towards her mouth it's only to kiss her with the sweetness of decades.)


End file.
